Tuesday, May 13, 2008

New Hampshire Sheep and Wool and... Knitalong!

Sunday Chris and I drove up to New Hampshire, where, like last year, we parked along the highway in a "Park and Ride" lot and biked the 14 miles to the Hopkinton Fairgrounds for the Sheep and Wool festival (Chris likes to get photos while biking like the one above). The day was perfect... I delivered my small chocolate brown fleece (the random gift discussed a few weeks ago) to the Zeilinger Wool Co., who will process it and send me the roving in a few months. Hooray! Look how nice the Zeilinger lady was.We ate buffalo cheesesteak sandwiches, lay in the sun and watched the sheepdogs (in another life we have sheepdogs instead of huge white lazy indoor cats), and did a little shopping. Okay, I ended up with a lot of yarn, but from only two booths! I was very focused! I even avoided blatant Grellow yarns, lovely ones!

That's 13 skeins of worsted weight creme-colored merino from Greenwood Hill Farm, producers of the very best merino I have ever used, one skein of their DK weight 2-ply in silver, and 5 skeins of 2-ply worsted from Zeilinger Wool Co. that was on sale for $1 an ounce. I have plans to make myself a warm wooly cardigan out of those skeins. The pattern in the middle is also from Greenwood Hill.

And I HAVE been knitting stuff. For instance... Here's progress on Chris' Lochinver from Fishermen's Sweaters. A brown tube of slightly varried textures. Not thrilling to view, but fun to knit.

And...

Hannah and I have started a knitalong, a two-person knitalong, making a mitered dishcloth each from Sugar & Creme SELF STRIPING cotton. We did not know of its existence until Saturday's trip to JoAnn fabrics and Savers. Neither of us has knit a miter. It's TIME.

Savers? It was good, really good. Hannah has organized photos. I, as yet, do not. I do have this one, however: